Taking a Walk with Grief
Five More Days Until The Understory is in your Hands!
While I was writing The Understory, I was envisioning it as scribbling field notes in a small hand size notebook: a series of disparate thoughts held together by a singular thread.
In my head the subtitle was always Field Notes on Grief from the Forest Floor. I wanted it to feel like a peek inside how grief often feels: patchy, piecemeal, staccato, full of stops and starts.
It’s often only on the other side of grief that you can fully make sense of all the parts and that’s what I wanted The Understory to feel like. A companion for the brain fog and disorientation and confusion of what grief can be, particularly when we experience what Jason Gray calls, “death without a funeral.” Those unseen, unclear deaths of friendships, ideals, expectations, hopes, even when all those things are with our own selves.
How do we mark those deaths? How we remain resilient through them? For me, it’s to keep notes. It’s to notice. It’s to believe that something good streams through all this consciousness, that something that looks dead is actually still very much alive—perhaps it’s, as a local forestry professor said of a nearby fallen tree, “just not vertical anymore.”
So many people are holding this little book in their hands this week and the feedback is rolling in. They’re saying it feels like a field notes size, that it’s patchwork and piecemeal, that it appears threaded through with death but is actually threaded through with life! They’re getting it! And it means so much to me. I don’t want to have to explain art but to have people GET IT without explaining it warms my heart in a big way.
If your grief feels staccato, stilted, confused, wandering, and rambling, maybe The Understory will be a companion for you along the way. She’s not going to show you where to go or take you somewhere you don’t want to go. She’s just out for a walk alongside you.
Five more days until she’s in your hands!
There is still time to preorder and get a high resolution I Am Here art print from Stephen Crotts. Details here. Tap on any of the below to preorder!
I was so excited yesterday to get the email that my books had shipped. Congratulations, Lore!!
I pre-ordered for the trees, but I read this words and felt tears in my eyes along with a catch in my throat. Can't wait to hold this in my hands, read through what I'm sure will be tears, and feel so much less alone. Thank you, Lore.